Description
In July 2024 Kiasmos returned with their second album, II, to critical and fan acclaim. The album took Ólafur Arnalds and Janus Rasmussen across four continents over the next 18 months, playing to sold-out audiences. Now the duo have entrusted five artists to completely reimagine it.
II Reworked will be released on vinyl and CD on July 3, with a digital release following on August 7. Kiasmos and Erased Tapes are partnering with selected independent record shops worldwide to invite fans to come and listen to the full album together the evening before the album’s physical release.
Arnalds and Rasmussen, together with executive producer Robert Raths, invited long-time friend and composer Alex Somers, producers/multi-instrumentalists duo Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith (aka Disiniblud), and fellow Icelandic composer duo Kjartan Holm and Sin Fang to rework the entire album. The result is a sprawling and shimmering trip back through the record’s melodies, with a dream-like daze more suited for after the dancefloor and when the lights have faded.
Talking about the project, Ólafur and Janus says: “There are so many layers within this music, and we were curious to see what might emerge when other artists shone a light on them. Bringing together this dream team felt very special. It was fascinating to discover what each artist connected with and what rose to the surface through their perspective.”
Nayar and Keith use electronic experimentation to reshape the emotional core, unveiling and highlighting stems that lay in the background of their original forms. Holm and Fang emphasise the simple beauty of the compositions through a more ambient and drone-led lens, honing in on each delicate moment and extracting something new, while Somers, working with analogue studio equipment, detunes pianos and strings and slows the pieces down, allowing the songs to reach new emotional heights.
The reworkers, in turn, have picked visual artists to expand on what they created with their own unique view of the world, in the form of a complete set of visuals for the album's 11 songs: Japanese video artist and musician Takagi Masakatsu creating his first hazy images in almost 10 years, Portland-based Jayden Becker's colourful stop-motion flickers us through Nayar & Keith's five reworks, and Icelandic filmmaker Kjartan Trauner's raw VHS footage shows us life in inner city Reykjavík.
